sounds associated with events (eg. steal key, capture key, etc.)

Enhanced team scoreboard

Other various bug fixes

And what I found MOST amusing - "In the spirit of the name of the mod, if only two teams are playing, team 1 is always female and team 2 is always male".

I AM GOING OUT OF TOWN NEXT WEEK, DON'T SEND ME ANY MAIL!

Odds are that I will get back and just flush the 500 messages in my mailbox.

No, I'm not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I'm getting a hotel room in a state where I don't know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.

I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose -- A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I'm sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.

This will be an interesting experiment for me. I have always wondered how much of my time that isn't at peak productivity is a necessary rest break, and how much of it is just wasted.

As per a suggestion from Jack Mathews, when you do a "setenv" from the console with a single parameter it will print out the value of that environment variable.

I tested gamma with 3Dfx and set our vid_gamma to 1.0 and tweaked SST_GAMMA and the same problem manifests itself, implying that the 3Dfx gamma is just hosed at very high values.

Spent some time trying to benchmark server performance (thanks to all those that hopped on for 3 minutes at a time!), but instrumented builds were hosing our numbers because of reduced performance. Irk. So we ended up not getting anything terribly useful out of the numbers.

Gamma for Voodoo 2 was not being set correctly, fixed it (Jack Mathews pointed that one out).

I've also fixed a lot of crap in our support for glPointParametersEXT, and the next patch should have that working (and NVidia is going to be supporting it Real Soon Now).

Wacky Fix du Jour

If you are playing with 3DFX based boards and are experiencing some connection difficulties or general wierdness over the net with a modem connection, make sure you are running the updated 3DFX MiniDriver for Quake II.

I've heard reports that it's fixed some play issues in some cases. For what it's worth, the updated minidriver will be included in the Quake II Deathmatch Pack "soon".

The First All Female Quake II Tournament

REGISTRATION OPENS FOR FIRST ALL FEMALE QUAKE TOURNAMENT

New York, New York (January 10, 1998) -- In praise of the exciting new game called Quake II and its support of the female gaming community, Julianne Gentile of Cleveland, Ohio, has organized the first all-female Quake II tournament.

Registration has begun for Queen of the Hill II, the sequel to the widely successful QuakeWorld Queen of the Hill (QOTH) event held last October. The first Queen of the Hill tournament was a terrific success and attracted the finest women gamers from around the world.

After only a few days of open registration, over fifty skilled Quake women have signed up for the competition. It is expected that over 200 players will have registered by January 31, 1998, the final day of registration.

The main purpose of the Queen of the Hill events is to allow women gamers to meet and have fun, although the competition generally turns out to be quite fierce.

Currently, the process of lining up sponsors and Quake II server providers for this event is under way. The games are scheduled to begin on February 27, 1998.

QOTH II is hosted by Focus on Quake, a personalized guide to Quake and Quake II from The Mining Company. Please contact Julianne Gentile (quake.guide@miningco.com) at The Mining Company for more information about this event.

Focus on Quake
http://quake.miningco.com/

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Major League Quake 2 has a new home. We are now hosted by unclespanky.com and can be found at http://www.unclespanky.com/MLQ2. For those unfamiliar with Major League Quake 2, Imagine if you will a league dedicated to the game play of Quake 2 in a professional format. MLQ2 has carefully been modeled after most Major League sports. It is your opportunity to play in the big leagues. To ensure the worlds best competition will be found within MLQ2 we have invited individuals as well as already formed teams to participate. MLQ2 has also taken it one step further. We have invited many Quake2 related sites and game related sites in general to form there own Quake2 all-stars. We are asking that these sites represent themselves in our league to find out once and for all who infact are the best Quake2 players in the world. Invitations have been sent to the likes of Mplayer, Heat, Gamepro, Quake2.com and many many more. Sites have already begun to accept our invitations. Quake2.com and Unclespanky.com are on the front line ready and willing to uphold there honor. There will be major announcements next week showcasing other sites who have chosen to participate.

We look forward to seeing you out on the battle field. Check us out at http://www.unclespanky.com/MLQ2.

I'm really pleased with how GameSpy 2.00 is turning out so far. I've received some good suggestions on how to use some of the sounds submitted to the Sound of the Fury contest. What I'm planning on doing right now is adding a theme selector to the Sound Events options page.

btw, STOP sending registration key requests / problems to help@gamespy.com and support@gamespy.com. Those addresses are for technical support. Send all registration email to orders@gamespy.com.